Software product Line (SPL) is an emerging methodology for developing software products. Stage-configuration is one the important processes applying to the SPL. In stage-configuration, different groups and different people make configuration choices in different stages. Therefore, a successful software product is highly dependent on the validity of stage-configuration process. In this paper, a rule-based method is proposed for validating stage-configuration in SPL. A logical representation of variability using First Order Logic (FOL) is provided. Five operations: validation rules, explanation and corrective explanation, propagation and delete-cascade, filtering and cardinality test are studied as proposed operations for validating stage-configuration. The relevant contributions of this paper are: implementing automated consistency checking among constraints during stage-configuration process based on three levels (Variant- to-variant, variant-to-variation point, and variation point-to-variation point), define interactive explanation and corrective explanation, define a filtering operation to guide the user within stage-configuration, and define (explicitly) delete-cascade validation.

V. Dedeban, “Ontology-Driven and Rules-Based System for Management and Pricing of Family of Product,” Master Thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Department of Computer and Information Science, Norway, 2007.

A. Schnieders, “Modeling and Implementing Variability in State Machine Based Process Family Architectures for Automotive Systems,” The 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Automotive Systems ICSE06, Shanghai, 2006.

K. Czarnecki and M. Antkiewicz, “Mapping Features to Models: A Template Approach Based on Superimposed Variants, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering GPCE’05, Tallinn, Estonia, 2005.